"INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, San Jose, Calif., Feb. 18, 2003 - Serial ATA is alive and well and living at Intel Developer Forum, Spring 2003, plus within the systems and devices now shipping, dozens more that are on the horizon and a number of momentous technical developments.

Attendees at IDF this week are getting a show-and-tell that signifies the next stages toward broad deployment of 1.5 Gb/s Serial ATA technology, the storage interconnect that replaces older parallel Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), and 1.5 Gb/s products with features defined under the enhancements specification of Serial ATA II. The technology is used to connect such internal storage devices as hard disks, DVDs and CD-R/Ws to the motherboard in desktop and mobile PCs, cost-sensitive servers and networked storage.

The Feb. 18-21 event at the San Jose Convention Center is playing host to several announcements and demonstrations related to the Serial ATA 1.0 spec, which was released in August 2001, and the first installment of the Serial ATA II enhancement spec announced in final form last October at the IDF in Tokyo.

The Serial ATA II Working Group this week is announcing two new incremental specifications: a Serial ATA II Port Multiplier specification release candidate and the completion and pending adoption of the Serial ATA II Cables and Connectors Volume 1 specification.

Demo highlights include:

Serial ATA II port multiplier technology [at the Intel Pavilion on the Technology Showcase floor, #34] -- What was one device per port can now be up to 15 with this hub technology. The increase in connectivity is attractive for any application requiring large numbers of drives; it enables the user to fan out and create more ports. The demo shows a single Serial ATA cable attached to a shoebox-sized storage box that includes a 1- to 4-port multiplier connecting four 200 GB drives delivering a total storage solution of 800 GB (that´s 3/4 of a terabyte of storage).

Serial ATA native queuing [scheduled at the Seagate (#401) and Silicon Image (#502) booths] - A Serial ATA solution implementing the command queuing feature outlined in the Serial ATA II spec that was released in October. The demo illustrates compelling performance advantages that are not achievable with parallel ATA.

Another attraction at IDF is the Serial ATA II Working Group booth (#503), where one of the first desktop systems integrated with Serial ATA will be shown. The Harddrive.com system featuring Seagate Barracuda ATA V SATA hard disk drives is one of two Serial ATA 1.5 Gb/s solutions already in the marketplace, and is running at the booth. The other pioneering system, from Okapi Software, is the ipXcelerator* D2D2T backup accelerator that allows for simultaneous back up of multiple servers over gigabit Ethernet. The product features the Intel® SRCS14L SATA RAID controller and Maxtor® DiamondMax™ Plus II SATA hard disk drives.

The buzz around Serial ATA at IDF comes on the heels of last month´s announcement that the Serial ATA II Working Group and the SCSI Trade Association (STA) agreed to enable Serial Attached SCSI system-level compatibility with SATA hard disk drives. The collaboration will result in unprecedented system configuration capabilities with multiple benefits to system
builders and IT professionals. Both groups have common members and influence with T10, which is the SCSI unit of ANSI´s International Committee on Information Technology Standards. The groups expect to see systems shipping with the capability in 2004.

In other developments, the SATA Working Group recently submitted the SATA 1.0 specification to the T13 ANSI Committee, and established the maturity of the specification through two successful plugfests with over 90 percent pass-rates..."